Smith’s accusations against Taitz came shortly after similar ones from Larry Sinclair, another key figure in the Obama conspiracy universe. In June 2008, Sinclair held a press conference at the National Press Club claiming he’d been lured into cocaine-fueled sex with Obama in a limo in 1999. He also has said he believes Obama had Donald Young, a Chicago choir conductor, killed. In an affidavit posted this month on Sinclair’s website, Sinclair says Taitz asked him to testify at her Sept. 8 hearing. He flew to Orange County from Florida, but the night before the hearing, Sinclair says, Taitz told him to testify he knew about three people who had been killed by Obama—a charge that Sinclair says isn’t true. The next day, he told her he wouldn’t testify and would be flying home.

Last week, a federal judge in Georgia threw out a suit Taitz had filed on behalf of Army flight surgeon Connie Rhodes, who disputed her orders to go to Iraq on the basis of her "birther" beliefs. Judge Clay Lands called the suit "frivolous" and threatened Taitz with sanctions if she brought more lawsuits to his court. When Taitz then filed an emergency request to block Rhodes’ deployment, Lands came back with a blistering seven-page order asking Taitz to show why she shouldn’t be fined $10,000. On the same day, Rhodes sent a letter to the court saying she had not authorized Taitz to fight Lands’ ruling and that she would be filing a California State Bar complaint against Taitz.

In Santa Ana, though, Carter has said that he hopes to eventually hear Taitz’s and Kreep’s lawsuit—representing scores of military officers, state representatives and former presidential candidates—on its merits. At the hearing, about a hundred spectators and plaintiffs showed up at the Ronald Reagan Federal Building and Courthouse, where Carter calmly indulged Taitz’s procedural missteps and set a tentative trial date for January 2010. A hearing on the government’s motion to dismiss the case is scheduled for Oct. 5.

John Gilhooley

Orly Taitz: Big birther

Taitz wouldn’t speak to the Weekly for this story, other than to say that everything Smith had said was a lie—except the part about obtaining the Kenyan birth certificate. On her blog, though, she has lashed out at her detractors in the mainstream media, the judiciary and the birther movement. “Please don’t listen to vicious rumors,” she wrote on Sept. 16. “I am getting close to removing the usurper.”

Portions of this story first appeared on the Weekly’s news blog, Navel Gazing.